Fig. 4: ERβ shares a positive correlation with Foxo3a and inversely correlates with Survivin in human breast cancer samples.

a Box-plots depicting relative gene expression of Foxo3a and Survivin (w.r.t GAPDH) in the same set of normal breast and BCa samples, as used in Fig. 1. b Representative IHC images of the candidate proteins Foxo3a, pFoxo3a and Survivin of the human BCa and adjacent normal breast tissues (the same samples used in Fig. 1a). All images are taken at ×200 magnification. c Box-plots depicting distribution of H-scores of Foxo3a, pFoxo3a and Survivin, in normal breast (n = 24) and BCa (n = 35) samples. Scatter-plot representation of the mean H-scores of d ERβ, PML and Foxo3a and f ERβ, PML, pFoxo3a and Survivin in adjacent normal breast and BCa tissues. Depiction of correlation coefficient (rs) between mean H-scores of e ERβ-Foxo3a-PML (g) Survivin-ERβ-pFoxo3a (top) and Survivin-PML-pFoxo3a (bottom) estimated from IHC images of both normal breast and BCa tissues combined. h Comparison of combined average H-scores of Foxo3a, pFoxo3a and Survivin. i Graphical representation of mean ranks of the observed individual H-scores of Foxo3a, pFoxo3a and Survivin as obtained through calculations from M–W U-test (left). Table displaying the calculated Mann–Whitney U-test values for the H-scores of each observed protein is on the right. The error bars represent the mean (±) s.d. of independent two-tailed Student’s t-tests. P < 0.0001 is represented as **** for highly significant